A Big Man Shrinks Into a New Role

LOS ANGELES — In early September, months after the last N.B.A. season had ended, Mike Conley tuned in to watch the FIBA Basketball World Cup on television. He saw someone with a resemblance to his Memphis Grizzlies teammate Marc Gasol: same bushy beard, same stern game face and same backward shuffle down the court after shooting a jumper from just beyond the free-throw line.

Except that this player was much thinner.

“I was like, Man, that can’t be Marc,” said Conley, the Grizzlies’ point guard. “It looks like he lost 50 pounds.”

Gasol, the Grizzlies’ center, had spent much of the summer in Spain cutting refined sugar, soda and processed foods from his diet; cutting back on carbohydrates and red meat; and adopting a mostly flexitarian, or semi-vegetarian, diet.

The resulting weight loss — Gasol would not put a number on it — has equipped him to handle a heavier scoring load, which has helped the Grizzlies surge to a league-best 15-2 start and has made Gasol an early candidate for the Most Valuable Player award.

It has also focused speculation on whether the newly diminished Gasol, who will be a free agent after this season, will disappear altogether from Memphis over the summer.

His diverse skill set would seem to be a seamless fit for the San Antonio Spurs, as Tim Duncan’s heir, or for the Knicks, as a centerpiece to Phil Jackson’s triangular rebuilding — or for just about any other team with enough salary cap space to accommodate a player whom the Grizzlies’ Zach Randolph calls the best big man in the N.B.A.

Beginning Dec. 12, Gasol, 29, is eligible to sign a contract extension with the Grizzlies for up to three years and nearly $55 million. But that is unlikely because if the Grizzlies wait until July 1, when he would hit the open market, they would be able to offer him nearly twice that much — just under $108 million, for five years.

Image

Gasol in February 2013.CreditDuane Burleson/Associated Press

Waiting those seven months would also give Gasol an opportunity to evaluate the Grizzlies, who have endured persistent management turmoil in the two years since Robert Pera became the controlling owner. The team has replaced its coach, its chief executive and its assistant general manager, and after last season, it allowed its current coach, Dave Joerger, to interview with the Minnesota Timberwolves before guaranteeing another year of his contract.

Gasol will consider many factors in deciding whether to stay, but the most important, he said, will be the level of his team’s commitment to winning.

“That’s going to be huge for me,” he said. “Because you’ve got to go to work every day and feel good about it, knowing that everyone is seeing the big picture, which is having the biggest chance to win a championship.”

He added: “I’d rather wait and see how we all feel after the season. Then you make a decision for the next four or five years of your life, and you’re feeling good about it and knowing that’s what you want to do.”

The trifling cost of waiting is having to listen to speculation and field questions about his intentions, a burden that is likely to intensify as the season carries on. It is in many ways a byproduct of doing business in the N.B.A. Shorter contracts and new free-agent rules have resulted in more stars’ looking around, a process that sometimes takes on a life — and a name — of its own: the Decision, Dwightmare I and II, Melo-drama, the Summer of Love.

“Speculation really is not a concern of mine,” said Chris Wallace, the Grizzlies’ general manager. “The whole free-agency period is a long way off, but what we’ve obviously made known to him is, the first priority of the organization is to keep him. He’s extremely important to us, and we’re going to get him re-signed one way or another, regardless of when that occurs.”

Wallace’s confidence is rooted in two factors. The Grizzlies have been successful in re-signing key players — Conley, Rudy Gay (now with Sacramento), Randolph and Tony Allen — even if it meant paying above-market rates. And Gasol has strong ties to the city, which he acknowledges would make it hard to leave.

Gasol arrived in the Memphis area as a 16-year-old when his older brother, Pau, started his N.B.A. career in the city, and he played two years of high school basketball there before going to Spain to begin his own professional career.

Since returning in 2008 to join the Grizzlies, who acquired his draft rights via a trade that sent Pau Gasol to the Los Angeles Lakers, Marc Gasol has been involved with the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and a foundation he and Pau set up. Gasol’s mother still lives in the Memphis area (his father returned to Spain with their youngest son, Adria) to be near Marc’s wife and their young child, and the Gasols still have the same seats, and family passes with the same photos, that they had when FedEx Forum opened 10 years ago.

Image

Marc Gasol diving for a ball. He said losing weight had helped him “push the whole time.”CreditBrandon Dill/Associated Press

“We have a lot of ties,” Gasol said.

The ties with Wallace, who returned in July to making the team’s basketball decisions after an 18-month exile, also extend deeply. Wallace was lampooned by fans, the news media and even the N.B.A. coaches Gregg Popovich and George Karl for seemingly donating Pau Gasol to the Lakers, a deal that no longer looks so one-sided.

In return, Wallace acquired Marc Gasol and some expiring contracts and draft picks that the Grizzlies have flipped into cap space for Randolph and the role players Quincy Pondexter and Kosta Koufos.

In the days after the trade, Wallace traveled to Spain to explain to Gasol’s parents why the team had traded one son and why it wanted the other, who was on his way to becoming the most valuable player of the Spanish league. Wallace was worried that Marc Gasol might prefer to remain in Spain for several more seasons.

“We had to have him right away,” Wallace said. “One, we needed his talent, and secondly, the interest level in the team had slipped. The honeymoon of having an N.B.A. team had worn off, and we were widely criticized for the deal we just made. We were under siege as an organization, and we desperately had to have him here. How would we sell the team’s future if Marc is sitting over in Barcelona for another three years?”

Joerger, the coach, said that after his first season, in 2013-14, he believed the Grizzlies needed to become more efficient offensively to be able to get past San Antonio and Oklahoma City, the teams that eliminated them the last two years in the playoffs. Achieving that goal involved improving Memphis’s perimeter shooting with the signing of Vince Carter (and the return from injury of Pondexter), as well as looking for opportunities to run.

Another goal was to make Gasol more assertive. With that in mind, he was encouraged to drop weight.

“Losing the weight makes you feel so comfortable; it makes you feel like you can push the whole time,” Gasol said. “You don’t have to take the co-pilot seat and let somebody else take over. You can be on the go most of the game.”

Gasol, the 2012-13 N.B.A. defensive player of the year, is shooting more, getting to the free-throw line more and scoring more — averaging 20.1 points per game, more than 6 above his career average — and he has contributed in myriad ways. In a win at Portland on Friday night, which ended the Trail Blazers’ nine-game winning streak, he had 26 points, 7 rebounds and 9 assists.

“This is something we knew Marc could do for a long time,” Conley said. “We’ve been waiting for him to do it. It took him so long to knock out of that shell.”

Now that Gasol has, the Grizzlies may have the league’s best center, a player who, like his team, is looming ever larger — even if he appears to be half the man he used to be.